Two Epistemic World-Views: Prefigurative Schemas and Learning in Complex Domains

Abstract

Epistemic world-views are beliefs about learning and, relatedly, about the phenomena of the world that prefigure the form knowledge schemata will take for an individual. Features of two kinds of epistemic world-views are presented: one is associated with various kinds of oversimplification of complexity known to be related to learning failure in ill-structured domains (e.g., belief in the orderliness and teleological homogeneity of phenomena, and adherence to strategies of analytic decomposition and compartmentalization); the other is characterized by opposing features more conducive to the processing of complexity. An assessment instrument intended to identify these epistemic world-views, the Cognitive Flexibility Inventory (CFI), is discussed. A factor analysis of the CFI scores of a sample of medical students provided support for the hypothesis that the features of the two world-views form correlated constellations. The importance of having a more expansive and flexible underlying cognitive stance in an increasingly complex world is addressed. © 1997 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.